Summary:
- The NC General Assembly passed a massive expansion of private school vouchers at the end of 2024
- Data shows that private schools accepting vouchers have significantly raised tuition for the subsequent school year
- Private school tuition hikes largely eliminate any boost in affordability
While power grabs and Jefferson Griffin’s refusal to concede his defeat in the State Supreme Court election took up most people’s attention after the November election, last year’s lame-duck Republican supermajority in the General Assembly also managed to ram through one last veto override in the form of House Bill 10. HB10 substantially expanded the state’s school private voucher program by injecting another $463 million for the 2024-2025 school year alone, while increasing the total cost of the program to a whopping $6.5 billion between now and 2033.
Carolina Forward has previously noted that the private school voucher program mostly benefits wealthy families in urban areas, which is partly why the expansion did not pass during the short session in 2024. There is also significant evidence that voucher programs reduce student achievement and fuel school segregation. But evidence-based concerns did not stop Republican lawmakers from ramming through spending bill anyway.
A key argument for proponents of private school vouchers has been that they make private education more accessible to families who could not otherwise afford it. Yet new tuition data from private schools accepting government vouchers now suggests this might not work out the way those proponents had hoped.
Signs of voucher tuition inflation
While Republican supporters of private school vouchers envisioned the system as a way to help families afford private school tuition, there is nothing in current state law that prevents private schools accepting government vouchers from simply raising their tuition accordingly – essentially claiming all the eligible taxpayer subsidy, but keeping the net costs to their customers (families) the same. Indeed, this is exactly what happened in Iowa’s widely-studied private school voucher scheme, where researchers found that the state’s system resulted in private schools hiking tuition by as much as 25 percent.
Adopting a similar method as those researchers, we used the Wayback Machine digital archive to collect tuition data from private schools in North and South Carolina for the 2023-34, 24-25, and 25-26 school years. We did this for a group of 24 private schools in North Carolina that stood to receive the greatest amount of voucher dollars in 2024-25, as well as 11 other private schools in North Carolina that do not accept vouchers and 15 private schools in South Carolina where they do not have a voucher program. (South Carolina serves as a particularly strong control group, as the State Supreme Court ruled their constitution prohibits private school vouchers. Some lawmakers there are still seeking to craft a bill that would work around this previous ruling.)
See all data on private school tuition cited here.
Starting with the group of private schools in North Carolina that do not accept Opportunity Scholarships, we see that tuition increased on average 6.08% between the 23-24 and 24-25 school years. Between the 24-25 school year and recently released numbers for the 25-26 school year, that average percentage increase is somewhat lower at 4.51%.
NC Private Schools Without Vouchers
For our group of private schools in South Carolina, tuition increased on average 5.86% between 23-24, and then 5.91% between 24-25. So it seems that on average private school tuition in the Carolinas has risen by about 6% in recent years.
SC Private Schools (No Vouchers)
Turning to look at our group of North Carolina private schools that received significant amounts of voucher subsidies, we notice something strikingly different. The average tuition increase for those schools between 23-24 and 24-25 is slightly higher, at 6.73%. That figure more than doubles to 15.82% between 24-25 and 25-26.
NC Private Schools Receiving Vouchers
This figure may be swayed by some outliers in our data like Grace Christian School in Sanford, whose tuition jumped 43% from 2023-2024. Berean Baptist in Fayetteville, Living Water Christian in Jacksonville, Salem Baptist in Winston-Salem, and Community Christian in Bessemer City all also have percent increases of over 20% in just the one school year immediately following the voucher expansion.
It beggars belief to suggest that the services at these schools have massively changed in just one, or even two, school years. It seems much more likely that these tuition increases represent rent-seeking behavior on the part of private school administrators. Spotting an opportunity to cash in from the voucher expansion and its easy terms, private schools are doing what any rational private entity would do: raising prices to capture the subsidy. It’s rational economic behavior on the part of private school administrators, but obviously leaves the school’s customers (the families attending) no better off, as their effective price is little changed.
The net effect of private school vouchers for these schools is, effectively, a massive transfer of taxpayer funds to the coffers of mostly evangelical Christian private schools with little impact to affordability.
What comes next
It’s worth noting that the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority, the state agency in charge of administering the voucher program, is required by law to collect a tuition and fees schedule from all private schools participating in the program. For now, however, they have not released that data publicly, making it much more difficult for anyone to monitor schools’ rent-seeking behavior. This is no great surprise, however. The NCSEAA – in large part due to deliberate legal constraints crafted by state lawmakers – performs very little oversight of the billions in North Carolina taxpayer money it disburses. North Carolina’s private school voucher system is widely known to be honeycombed with fraud, waste and abuse.
The State Board of Education voted recently for a moratorium on new voucher spending. It did so because the pattern of investment from state lawmakers has been a slow divestment away from the goal of a sound, basic education to all North Carolina children. This is not only the wrong decision for the future of our state, but also for the next generation of North Carolina’s kids. If the General Assembly wants to make a smart investment that will benefit all North Carolinians, the choice is clear: invest in public schools.
